The Front Page

By Jim Shepard

Published: October 13, 1996

MANHATTAN NOCTURNE

By Colin Harrison.

355 pp. New York:

Crown Publishers. $24.

The protagonist of Colin Harrison's third novel, a top-of-the-heap tabloid columnist named Porter Wren, sells his mayhem, scandal and tragedy in New York City, that ''landscape of bad possibilities.'' He leads an irregular life. (''I get calls in the night and . . . go wherever it happened: the car, the bar, the street, the club, the store.'') He's happily married and the devoted father of two children, but his appetites have always landed him in trouble. In the tradition of Walter Neff of ''Double Indemnity'' and countless other smart guys who should have known better, Porter is now sorting through the rubble after the fact, and making, he tells us, ''a confession and an investigation'' into the workings of his own heart. As we might expect, it all began with a woman.

At the sort of glittering party that has Joe Montana rubbing elbows with Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Porter is tantalized by the mysterious and beautiful Caroline Crowley. A reader familiar with the dictates of noir will recognize the drill: she's the most stunning woman in the room, with ''a full, throaty voice,'' and seems jaded beyond her years. She's inexplicably focused on him.

Our hero mutters cynical and knowing things about not playing the sap and then hustles right off into her Erotic Web of Intrigue. She wants him to investigate the murder of her husband, a Wunderkind film maker, himself a chronicler of urban noir, who died violently, under baffling circumstances. It's clear that she's not telling the whole truth. It's clear that she's trouble. There's even a fragment of a jade figurine involved.

Porter, however, ignores the warning signs. (Caroline's ''entire apartment was sterile. Like a hotel suite . . . it had no character, no essence of its inhabitant''; it was all ''expensive surfaces.'') And soon it becomes clear that he's deeply entangled with powerful forces. But by now he's in Caroline's sexual thrall, so he proceeds to act out the ritual we know so well: ''I washed my face and looked in the mirror. I'd heard a lie in Caroline's voice somewhere, maybe more than one, and I wanted to think carefully about what she'd told me. But I was tired and my head swam with the drink.'' ''The thing was driving me mad. There was something I wasn't seeing.''

What's striking about this genre -- by this point a hybrid of at least the hard-boiled detective novels of the 1930's and all the film noirs since then -- is the way it indefatigably centers on the protagonist's anxiety about the overtly sexual female's essential unreadability. The Bad Woman, out for herself and willing to use her body, is the figure upon which all the action turns, the cipher upon which the protagonist projects meanings that leave him unsatisfied. She is the irresistible force in a genre that prizes, above all else, control. She triggers the titillating exchange of weakness and power that fascinates both the protagonist and the genre's adherents. To paraphrase James M. Cain, she's the wish that has terror in it. (One of Cain's hapless heroes cracks, right before the roof falls in, ''I loved her like a rabbit loves a rattlesnake.'')

Mr. Harrison, who is the author of the well-received novels ''Bodies Electric'' and ''Break and Enter,'' this time has produced a thriller that seems to want to be equal parts Raymond Chandler, William Styron and Tom Wolfe. When not in his no-nonsense Philip Marlowe mode (''I was a married newspaperman. It didn't make much sense to me. It didn't need to, not yet''), Porter meditates with a sad fatalism on the dark domestic crises of the heart, or muses satirically on the grotesque inequalities of the city's economic stratification. There is, of course, a nice dovetailing between the world view of a novel like ''The Bonfire of the Vanities'' and the premises of noir: that vision of society as wilderness, a world of deceptive surfaces where guilt, because it's all-pervasive, can be assigned to sacrificial victims.

These corollary aspirations generate some of the greatest pleasures in Mr. Harrison's novel, so that the same narrative that impresses us with its top-to-bottom knowledge of New York City fauna is also illuminating about the quiet acts of omission that irrevocably damage a marriage. (Porter's wife, Lisa, is a wonderfully drawn character.) ''Manhattan Nocturne'' is also filled with tips for the street-smart: how to remove the Club from a steering wheel with aerosol Freon and a hammer; how to track down a British citizen in Manhattan without the help of a phone number, address or Social Security number.

These sorts of pleasures also allow for digressions (there's a discussion of back labor during delivery) and editorials: ''These aims had been leached out of me (as they generally have been from the American news media, which, as the 20th century draws to a close, seems to sense its own clamoring irrelevance, its humble subservience to a pagan culture of celebrity).'' As a result, the pace is not exactly headlong. The digressions and editorials help inhibit the sense of desperation and fear that usually drives such stories. (This is a genre, after all, that lists among its titles ''Journey Into Fear,'' ''Ministry of Fear,'' ''Fear in the Night,'' ''Sudden Fear,'' ''Storm Fear,'' ''Cape Fear,'' ''Experiment in Terror,'' ''Nightmare Alley'' and ''I Wake Up Screaming.'')

Fear seems necessary in thematic as well as narrative terms, since we assume that what underlies the narrator's terror of the femme fatale's impenetrability is his terror of his own. And though Porter talks a lot about the other, dark side of himself, he doesn't seem particularly anxious on that score. It's as if he's had his sense of self diminished -- in a squinting, tough-guy way -- but not really rocked. (''All this bleeding was my fault, and I was glad that Lisa and the kids were far away from me. I wasn't worthy of them now. Somehow this was not a surprise to me; always I have known that I am selfish and small-hearted.'') And that may be the point at which Styron's and Chandler's protagonists are incompatible: part of the romance in noir seems to involve a final secret sense of satisfaction with the self-betrayal, a sense of ''I didn't know I had it in me.'' Which may be why, in the early stages, the femme fatale always initiates our hero into another, more intense world of passion.

Noir then becomes an unexpectedly unsuitable vehicle for a literary portrait of a soul divided, since its focus, finally, is not, as the narrator claims, on having had to dismantle and reassemble his sense of himself so much as it is on his delight at having reasserted control in the face of the bad woman's charms, and having gained the power to read her accurately: ''She had a beautiful face, but she could make it ugly, and now she did. . . . 'No, Caroline, no. You brought me into this. You thought you could just . . . lead me around. But you didn't study me very carefully, Caroline, you didn't figure out how a small-town boy like me with not one connection in New York City elbowed and hustled and hassled his way to be a newspaper columnist.' ''

The novel's protagonist is most memorable when that small-town boy, for all his bluster, articulates with real sadness his understanding of his own wrongdoing, and of the damage he's done to those he loves: ''The house will be empty again, quiet again, until someone else stands there, looking at the windows and walls and floors, mindful perhaps that the last occupants, my wife and children and myself, were only passing through.''

When Porter Wren scales back from sexual athlete and social satirist

to homebody, ''Manhattan Nocturne'' soars.

Jim Shepard's most recent book is a collection of short stories, ''Batting Against Castro.''